Barbour's 10 most barbed quotes

Former Mississippi Gov. Haley Barbour (R) stirred controversy Tuesday when it was revealed that he had said in a closed-door meeting of GOP donors that he wished New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie had “put a hot poker to Obama’s butt” in his keynote speech at the Republican National Convention.

Here’s POLITICO’s list of the top 10 quotes that illustrate the feisty — and controversial — style that has become the former governor’s trademark:

1. In 1982, Barbour’s reprimand of an aide who had made a racist remark only made the situation worse. Barbour said that if the aide “persisted in racist remarks, he would be reincarnated as a watermelon and placed at the mercy of blacks,” according to The Daily Beast.

2. “I just don’t remember it as being that bad,” Barbour said in 2010, of the civil rights revolution, to The Weekly Standard. “I remember Martin Luther King came to town, in ’62. He spoke out at the old fairground and it was full of people, black and white.”

3. Barbour explained his opposition to the repeal of “don’t ask, don’t tell” by saying on a radio show that, “when you’re under fire, and people are living and dying on split-second decisions, you don’t need any kind of amorous mind-set that can affect saving people’s lives and killing bad guys.”

4. “You can step on your d—k … You just can’t jump up and down on it,” Barbour said, on Texas Gov. Rick Perry’s “oops” moment at a Republican presidential primary debate, according to a RealClearPolitics e-book.

5. “I’m a lobbyist and had a career lobbying. The guy who gets elected or the lady who gets elected president of the United States will immediately be lobbying,” Barbour said in 2011, defending his career in the lobbying sector.

6. “Once you start down the slippery slope of saying, ‘That person can’t be for me,’ then where do you stop? … I don’t care who has my picture. My picture’s in the public domain,” Barbour told the AP, explaining why he didn’t ask the Council of Conservative Citizens to take his picture off its website. The organization had supported segregation in the past.

7. “That’s like saying I should be an ad for Weight Watchers,” Barbour told conservative website Townhall.com, when it was brought to his attention that a White House administration official had said that the Muslim Brotherhood was a largely secular organization. “That’s absurd.”

8. “There are a lot of people in the Republican Party who are not that conservative, including our nominee for president,” Barbour told reporters in June, going somewhat off message. “He was the least conservative of the serious candidates.”

9. “To me, it’s a sort of feeling that it’s a nit, that it is not significant,” Barbour said, of the fact that Virginia Gov. Bob McDonnell’s proclamation of Confederate History Month lacked a reference to slavery.